# /mnt
**/mnt** is the conventional location for temporarily mounting filesystems by hand. There is no daemon managing it and no automatic population — a sysadmin mounts something here, uses it, and unmounts it. It is a scratch space for one-off mounts: a USB drive being inspected, a disk image being repaired, another OS partition being accessed for recovery.

```sh
# mount a disk partition and browse it
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
ls /mnt
umount /mnt

# mount a disk image
mount -o loop disk.img /mnt

# mount a network share
mount -t nfs 192.168.1.10:/exports/data /mnt
```

The convention is to use `/mnt` for short-lived mounts managed by a person, `/media` for removable media mounts managed automatically by the desktop environment (USB drives, optical discs), and dedicated mount points under `/` for permanent system mounts defined in `/etc/fstab`. Some distributions create subdirectories under `/mnt` as permanent stubs (`/mnt/usb`, `/mnt/backup`) to make intent clearer, but this is a local convention rather than a standard.